Amazed to say this is the fiftieth post in “The Annotated Nightstand” column! Whew. Thank you, ! Now, to get to business: Eugene Lim’s was originally published in 2008 and has just been reissued by Coffee House. The plot-driven description is it follows two young people—Fog and Car—after they divorce.
In this new edition, the inimitable , one of the blurbers for the original, writes in her introduction of “the uniquely intimate and unsettling way Lim reveals the precarity of their aloneness.” Initially, through alternating chapters, they seem to emulate their names. Fog’s life is unmoored after he has moved back to his rural Ohio hometown to be a schoolteacher.
This uncertainty emulated in the text itself with brief paragraphs, lots of white space. Car, on the other hand, has moved to New York, lined up an apartment and a job, starts swimming for exercise. She is on a path, chugging along.
But eventually things get soupy for her and sharpen for Fog. And there’s an ex-best friend of Fog who ghosted, that fracture potentially changing Fog and Car’s marriage. Car sees him in New York and starts to follow him.
One of the beautiful things about is how (like the recent works of Anna Moschovakis, K-Ming Chang, Caren Beilin), despite the trajectory of the characters, it is a slow burn. The predominant sense of the book is the existential angst in changing your life by taking someone out of it. Ennui and the odd pursuits to drive it away, or explore it, were some o.